Sixty-Six Ways to Call Your Lover

The question Corrine Colarusso’s paintings raise is this: At this late date in the 20th century when, it would seem, everything in painting has already been done, what do we expect painting to do? to mean? to say? As a point of departure, we can reformulate this question by asking, quite simply, what are Colarusso’s paintings about? Admittedly, we are all sufficiently skilled in discussions about art to avoid this issue head on; besides, we know that painting is so multivalent that it signifies like crazy in a million directions at once. The response is automatic: Is anything ever about just one thing? O.K. O.K. For the moment, humor me, and play along with this game. Its rules are really quite simple. You just keep asking the same “what is it about” question, over and over again.

What are Colarusso’s paintings about? One could say that her paintings are about nature. She works out-of-doors, “in nature” so to speak, and her themes concern the “natural” elements, light, water, ﬂora and fauna, the sun and the moon and the sky, grassy fields, quiet glades, rocky shorelines, turbulent clouds, and so forth. But is this being “about nature?” The American philosopher, A.O. Lovejoy, identified the word “nature” and its derivations to have at least sixty-six senses. (See A.O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Baltimore, 1935.) And each of them has been the basis for praise and dispraise. The multivalence of the word “nature” comes out very clearly when we think of some of those ideas to which it is antithetical: the supernatural, art, custom, the post-primitive as contrasted with the primitive.

To which “nature” shall we contrast Colarusso’s art? Shall we focus upon the basic distinction between nature and art, for example, where art means those concerns in which the human being consciously and deliberately changes the raw material of experience. To one who prefers nature to art all learning, all education, all intellectual constructions whatsoever, should be rejected in favor of some power which could probably be called instinct. The difficulty, of course, is that our “nature” is already spoiled by “art.” We are no more the Noble Savage than we are the innocent child (a speculum naturae, in Cicero’s term, or a mirror of nature), or the peasant whose innate simplicity guarantees intimacy with nature, in the sense of the “unspoiled” landscape. Wordsworth’s sentiments–that “One impulse from a vernal wood may teach more of man,/of moral evil and of good,than all the sages can.”–are hardly those of the beholders of Colarusso’s paintings.

Intimacy with nature can also be expressed as an admiration for the out-of-doors, an esteem fully expressed in landscape painting. Perhaps Colarusso’s painting, then, is about the idea of the “landscape,” as differentiated from that of “nature.” Hers is an embrace of the 19th century style of landscape painting, when the image of a landscape without figures came into its own. Perhaps a reaction from the spread of industrialism, or a nostalgia for rural scenery–the cause of this relatively new theme is unknown, but whatever its source, it did express a love for nature in the sense of the environment untouched by humankind. And when people in the l9th century spoke of nature,they usually meant nonhuman nature. This comes out brilliantly in such an essay as Emerson’s “Nature.” The touch of the vernal wood is here expanded to include the hills, the streams, and the meadows, and it is interesting to observe that Emerson never seems to include a human being as part of nature. The spectacle of untouched nature which sufficed not only for poets but for painters in the 19th century, takes on decidedly political overtones in the late 20th century. The collateral of such pictures as “Vapors, Living On Air,” or “Pouring Light,” or the romantic majesty of eternities of lustrous vistas Colarusso paints, is not that of natura narurans, that concept of nature as an active force or that which creates and is uncreated, which was at the heart of nature-worship and was repeatedly imaged in l9th century American landscape painting, but that of natura naturata, a passive force, or that which is uncreating and created. Ours is a diminished nature, one constantly consumed and depleted. Our collective fear is that soon, there will be no more nature left.

Vapors Living On Air, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 65

Pouring Light,1992,acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches

To contrast Colarusso’s landscapes with those of the Hudson River School and the Luminists, is to become painfully aware that hers are images derived from her backyard, or from state parks–not the limitless epic wildernesses that inspired Church and Bierstadt and Cole. A similar feeling for spatial grandeur, for bucolic light, and for panoramic perspectives exists in Colarusso’s painting, but unlike her predecessors she very intentionally employs devices that emphasize the act of painting. In a sense, she problematizes unmitigated access to the cosmology of nature, breaking our trancelike absorption vvithin that imaginative arena with a grid of rifts and seams that repeatedly bring us back to the surface, back to the act of framing, back to the art(ifice).

What is Colarusso’s painting about? Rather than “nature” or “landscape,” albeit important pivotal subjects in her work, her central thematic is much more concerned with painting itself. We accept the seduction of the places she paints. We knovv what that rapture feels like. We enter as deeply into those shaggy fields and voluptuous surging waters and sunset drenched shores as into the familiar ﬂeshy curves and pungent scents and murmuring whispers of our most intimate lover. Desire is stimulated by the vision of luminous moonlight caressing a silky liquid lake, of vaporous mists whose colors we inhale deeply and upon whose currents we gently glide with such alacrity that We become pure spirit. No weight of gravity confines sensation or inhibits perception. The rhythms of this animistic other world make bird’s song and the sound of rustling leaves roll from our lips. We metamorphose into deep space, and yield to the mystery and beauty of this meta-nature in which clouds transform into oceans into mountains into marshlands into rays of sunlight. This is the nature in which Shakespeare found tongues in trees and sermons in stones as did the Ancients find nymphs in springs.

And yet, as We soar and settle in these warps of space and time and geologic circumstance, another logic is at work, one peculiar to the mind rather than the soul. What appears to be solid is ephemeral; what we want to be continuous is fragmented. What we impose upon this experience is a kind of mapping–and that brings us to the parallel universe of the paint itself. No matter, for hovv easily we continue the pleasures of exploration, how easily bunches ofgrasses and pools of dark Waters become brush strokes. We are brought back to the compositional geometry of the surface only to discover that the paint itself nourishes our sensual absorption. Momentarily caught in the act of imaginative play, We plunge again, but this time into the “natural” scenery of how these colors enrich, how those mute, how these labyrinthine complexities are balanced by those events of sheer tranquility. What is the intuitive process that guided their making? There we live, alongside the painter, a life in which, from the simplest of material elements, meaning distills. What is Colarusso’s painting about? Return, for a moment, to the question initially posed at the beginning of this essay. What do we expect painting to do? to mean? to say‘? My suggestion is that at the end of the 20th century, when indeed everything in painting seems already to have been done, we can heave a big collective sigh of relief. The opportunity is ours to contemplate the prima facia evidence of painting itself, apart from stylistic considerations (is it abstract or representational; is its subject this, or its attitude that) and the onus to perform internal critiques or to expose networks of modish and outmoded ideologies. The opportunity is ours to rediscover the potential of painting to speak a language whose rationalism is predicated upon intuitive and subjective engagements, one in which the sensual and the intellectual are inextricably linked, rather than forced into opposition. Colarusso’s painting has the ability to support any number of interpretative discourses; but its strength is that it always brings us back to the process of painting itself as a type of unmediated experience. No, hers are not secular recreations of the perfect body of painting, nor expressions of unalloyed singularity of the sort that Modernist ideology promulgated. And no, hers are not statements that foreclose upon the sublime dimensions of painting in the manner performed by period Post-Modernism. Those debates are external to the experience Colarusso promotes. Rather, much in the manner that Benedetto Croce once described, her paintings place emphasis on the “artistic intuition,” one in which the artist gains knowledge of a pre-perceptual nature by means of intuition. And as the true intuition of the artist objectifies itself in expressive form, intuition and expression are actually identical. Given our understanding of the aesthetic situation–one in which the artist and the object and the beholder are equal participants– Colarusso’s art indeed signifies a communal life in which intuition and expression–hers, yours, mine, ours–ﬂourish. And in that vitalized visual climate, we can muse on the meaning of paint, and of painting itself, from the inside out. For the proposition Colarusso makes is this: think about painting all you want, but first and foremost, never forget what it feels like.